Like other nonliterate peoples, the Bedouin have a strong oral tradition and use poetry for all forms of communication and entertainment. Based on twenty years of studying the poetry of the Bedouin of Sinai and the Negev, this book presents 115 poems recorded between 1967 and 1985. Bailey arranges the poems according to their content, providing for each an introduction, a version of the poem in Arabic script and transliteration, and notes on the poem's cultural, linguistic, and historical background.

Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev is the first comprehensive study of Bedouin law published in English, including oral, pre-modern law. The material for the book, collected over the course of forty years of field work by Clinton Bailey, one of the world's leading scholars on Bedouin culture, is of permanent scholarly value.

Bailey shows how a nomadic desert-dwelling society provides for its own law and order in the traditional absence of any centralized authority or law enforcement agency to protect it. This comprehensive picture of Bedouin law, offers readers a...